1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a computer system, and deals more particularly with methods, systems, and computer program products for prioritizing application traffic in a networking environment that uses a stateless protocol (such as the HyperText Transfer Protocol, or “HTTP”).
2. Description of the Related Art
The popularity of electronic commerce (“e-commerce”, also referred to as electronic business or “e-business”), or buying goods and services over a network such as the Internet, continues to increase at a tremendous pace. Estimates are that consumer electronic commerce transactions will grow from under $10 billion in 1998 to over $100 billion by 2003.
A particular business may participate in electronic commerce only with consumers (i.e., in business-to-consumer or “B2C” transactions), or only with other businesses (i.e., in business-to-business or “B2B” transactions). Or, a business may participate in electronic commerce for both B2C and B2B transactions.
Businesses that participate in the global e-commerce marketplace are driven by competitive stress to provide the best and most cost-effective value to prospective consumer clients and business partner clients. Within this highly-competitive business environment, the client's perception of the service provided becomes critical to a business's profitability and even the survival of its electronic marketplace, since the client is only “one click away” from a competitor's electronic marketplace. Accordingly, e-business establishments seek to obtain every competitive advantage possible from their e-business infrastructure.
One of the significant problems facing e-businesses is how to prioritize traffic effectively. Consider, for example, an office supply company that offers its customers many different items from its Web site. For simplicity, suppose that the company's products can be grouped according to their selling price, as follows:
1. Inexpensive items. In this example, this group consists mainly of items that sell for $5.00 or less, such as paper clips, pencils and pens, notebook paper, and so forth.
2. Moderately-priced items. This group consists of items that sell for more than $5.00, but not more than $100.00. Examples might include boxes of paper, hand-held calculators, and small office furniture.
3. Expensive items. This group consists of items than sell for more than $100.00, such as hand-held computers, desktop computers, or large office furniture.
If messages conveying a client's request to purchase a box of paper clips receive the same network priority as a client's request to purchase several desktop computers and items of office furniture, then the e-business is not using its infrastructure in the most productive manner. Other types of businesses may also offer products or services spanning a wide price range, and this inefficient use of resources will be encountered by those businesses as well.
Accordingly, what is needed are techniques for providing differentiated priority for network traffic, in an application-specific manner.